Plymouth (software)

Last updated
Plymouth
Original author(s) Ray Strode
Initial releaseMay 30, 2008 (2008-05-30)
Stable release
22.02.122 / January 11, 2022;17 months ago (2022-01-11) [1]
Repository
Written in C
Operating system Linux
Type Bootsplash
License GNU General Public License 2
Website Plymouth at freedesktop.org

Plymouth is an application which provides a graphical boot experience for Linux. Plymouth supports animations using Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) and the KMS driver. Plymouth is bundled with an initial ramdisk which allows it to run before the file system is mounted. Some sources claim that Plymouth is named after Plymouth Rock, symbolizing the program's role as the first thing a user sees, but this has not been confirmed in any official capacity. [2]

Contents

History

The development of Plymouth began in May 2007 at Red Hat as a replacement for Red Hat Graphical Boot (RHGB). [3] Fedora became the first distribution to ship Plymouth as default in Fedora 10, replacing RHGB. [4] Ubuntu has included it in since Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx". [5]

Plymouth can now be found in much of the desktop Linux space. Some notable examples include: Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Linux Mint, MX Linux, and Manjaro Linux.

Design

Plymouth is made up of two components:

Plymouth also provides a library, libply.so, to allow developers to create applications that interact with the daemon. [7]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linux distribution</span> Operating system based on the Linux kernel

A Linux distribution is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel, and often a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one of the Linux distributions, which are available for a wide variety of systems ranging from embedded devices and personal computers to powerful supercomputers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Security-Enhanced Linux</span> Linux kernel security module

Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is a Linux kernel security module that provides a mechanism for supporting access control security policies, including mandatory access controls (MAC).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">APT (software)</span> Free software package management system

Advanced package tool, or APT, is a free-software user interface that works with core libraries to handle the installation and removal of software on Debian, and Debian-based Linux distributions. APT simplifies the process of managing software on Unix-like computer systems by automating the retrieval, configuration and installation of software packages, either from precompiled files or by compiling source code.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ubuntu</span> Linux distribution developed by Canonical

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: Desktop, Server, and Core for Internet of things devices and robots. All of the editions can run on a computer alone, or in a virtual machine. Ubuntu is a popular operating system for cloud computing, with support for OpenStack. Ubuntu's default desktop changed back from the in-house Unity to GNOME after nearly 6.5 years in 2017 upon the release of version 17.10.

Technical variations of Linux distributions include support for different hardware devices and systems or software package configurations. Organizational differences may be motivated by historical reasons. Other criteria include security, including how quickly security upgrades are available; ease of package management; and number of packages available.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NetworkManager</span> Software

NetworkManager is a daemon that sits on top of libudev and other Linux kernel interfaces and provides a high-level interface for the configuration of the network interfaces.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Compiz</span> Compositing window manager for the X Window System

Compiz is a compositing window manager for the X Window System, using 3D graphics hardware to create fast compositing desktop effects for window management. Effects, such as a minimization animation or a cube workspace, are implemented as loadable plugins. Because it conforms to the ICCCM conventions, Compiz can be used as a substitute for the default Mutter or Metacity, when using GNOME Panel, or KWin in KDE Plasma Workspaces. Internally Compiz uses the OpenGL library as the interface to the graphics hardware.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PulseAudio</span> Sound server for Unix-like operating systems

PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD, macOS, as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. It serves as a middleware in between applications and hardware and handles raw PCM audio streams.

HAL is a software subsystem for UNIX-like operating systems providing hardware abstraction.

Upstart is a discontinued event-based replacement for the traditional init daemon—the method by which several Unix-like computer operating systems perform tasks when the computer is started. It was written by Scott James Remnant, a former employee of Canonical Ltd. In 2014, Upstart was placed in maintenance mode, and other init daemons, such as systemd, were recommended in place of Upstart. Ubuntu moved away from Upstart with the release of version 15.04 in favor of migrating to systemd. As of March 2023, there have been no updates released for Upstart since September 2014.

nouveau (software) Open source software driver for Nvidia GPU

nouveau is a free and open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards and the Tegra family of SoCs written by independent software engineers, with minor help from Nvidia employees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wubi (software)</span> Ubuntu Linux installer for Windows

Wubi is a free software Ubuntu installer, that was the official Windows-based software, from 2008 until 2013, to install Ubuntu from within Windows, to a single file within an existing Windows partition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Polkit</span> Component of UNIX systems

Polkit is a component for controlling system-wide privileges in Unix-like operating systems. It provides an organized way for non-privileged processes to communicate with privileged ones. Polkit allows a level of control of centralized system policy. It is developed and maintained by David Zeuthen from Red Hat and hosted by the freedesktop.org project. It is published as free software under the terms of version 2 of the GNU Lesser General Public License.

systemd Suite of system components for Linux

Systemd is a software suite that provides an array of system components for Linux operating systems. The main aim is to unify service configuration and behavior across Linux distributions. Its primary component is a "system and service manager" – an init system used to bootstrap user space and manage user processes. It also provides replacements for various daemons and utilities, including device management, login management, network connection management, and event logging. The name systemd adheres to the Unix convention of naming daemons by appending the letter d. It also plays on the term "System D", which refers to a person's ability to adapt quickly and improvise to solve problems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AppStream</span> Linux application programming interface

AppStream is an agreement between major Linux vendors to create an infrastructure for application installers on Linux and sharing of metadata.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linspire</span> Linux distribution

Linspire is a commercial operating system based on Debian and Ubuntu and currently owned by PC/OpenSystems LLC. It had been owned by Linspire. Inc. from 2001 to 2008, and then by Xandros from 2008 to 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zim (software)</span> Personal wiki software written in Python

Zim is a graphical text editor designed to maintain a collection of locally stored wiki-pages, a personal wiki. Each wiki-page can contain things like text with simple formatting, links to other pages, attachments, and images. Additional plugins, such as an equation editor and spell-checker, are also available. The wiki-pages are stored in a folder structure in plain text files with wiki formatting. Zim can be used with the Getting Things Done method.

mkd (software) Software to generate software documentation

mkd is a software application for extracting pre-encoded comments lines to generate software documentation according to the ISO/IEC standard. mkd is an abbreviation of make documentation. mkd was originally known as mkdoc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UPower</span>

UPower is a piece of middleware for power management on Linux systems. It enumerates power sources, maintains statistics and history data on them and notifies about status changes. It consists of a daemon (upowerd), an application programming interface and a set of command line tools. The daemon provides its functionality to applications over the system bus. PolicyKit restricts access to the UPower functionality for initiating hibernate mode or shutting down the operating system (freedesktop.upower.policy). The command-line client program upower can be used to query and monitor information about the power supply devices in the system. Graphical user interfaces to the functionality of UPower include the GNOME Power Manager and the Xfce Power Manager.

References

  1. "Plymouth graphical boot system". gitlab.freedesktop.org. 2022-01-11. Retrieved 2022-01-11.
  2. "WhyTheName - Debian Wiki". wiki.debian.org. Retrieved 2023-05-25.
  3. "Red Hat Replaces RHGB With Plymouth". Phoronix. Archived from the original on 2023-03-31. Retrieved 2023-05-23.
  4. "Features/BetterStartup". Fedora Project Wiki. Red Hat. Archived from the original on 2023-05-11.
  5. "Publishing history : plymouth package : Ubuntu". Launchpad. 2010-04-03. Retrieved 2023-05-23.
  6. "Plymouth". Freedesktop.org. Archived from the original on 2023-05-24. Retrieved 2023-05-25.
  7. "Plymouth". Ubuntu Wiki. Archived from the original on 2023-02-01. Retrieved 2023-05-25.